I have a server running CentOS 6.2. The computer has 32GB of RAM, 2 dual core xeon 3GHz processors, but it seems to run my apps REALLY slowly.

I used the DaCapo benchmark suite to do some tests. The server takes 64 seconds to run the "avrora" benchmark. (By comparison, my laptop running Ubuntu 10.04 with 2GB ram and 1 dual core xeon 2.4GHz processor runs the same test in 9 seconds.)

I've tested the hard drives, and they run quite fast. The server is also not running a GUI.

The problem is, I really don't have a good idea where to start on tracking down why this is running so slow. Does anyone have any ideas, or suggestions of avenues for me to explore? I'm wondering if I have configured something in the OS incorrectly.

Hopefully this time my post is a little bit improved to have enough information Sorry if it is not again!!! Also, sorry if I have chosen the wrong category for this post. At the beginning I assumed it was a hardware problem.

At the end is the output of get_info.sh.

To add a little bit more information(and my apologies for the vagueness here, but it seems like there is something in the following detail):

The server in question is in a remote place, however I've installed CentOS 6.2 on a local server to try and reproduce the problem. The server has a minimal install without a GUI. I ran the Java benchmark "avrora" from the "DaCapo" library "http://dacapobench.org/" The result was that it took ~1000 seconds to complete.

Next I reinstalled CentOS 6.2 with the development workstation option(on the same server), and loaded into the GUI. Now the same benchmark runs in 12 seconds, which is a perfectable great time!

So now my question is: what is different between these two installs? And how can I bring my remote server up to having whatever is missing? (I have no out-of-band access)

# This is the default, if you make this bigger yum won't see if the metadata# is newer on the remote and so you'll "gain" the bandwidth of not having to# download the new metadata and "pay" for it by yum not having correct# information.# It is esp. important, to have correct metadata, for distributions like# Fedora which don't keep old packages around. If you don't like this checking# interupting your command line usage, it's much better to have something# manually check the metadata once an hour (yum-updatesd will do this).# metadata_expire=90m

The server in question is in a remote place, however I've installed CentOS 6.2 on a local server to try and reproduce the problem. The server has a minimal install without a GUI. I ran the Java benchmark "avrora" from the "DaCapo" library "http://dacapobench.org/" The result was that it took ~1000 seconds to complete.

Next I reinstalled CentOS 6.2 with the development workstation option(on the same server), and loaded into the GUI. Now the same benchmark runs in 12 seconds, which is a perfectable great time!

Since it sounds like the major difference here is the lack of or presence of the GUI, have you tried running your benchmark on the same machine where it currently runs in 12 seconds but booted in runlevel 3 (command line)? I'd suspect that your benchmark is trying to open a GUI window and timing out - probably more than once to get to 1000 seconds. If the workstation runs it in another extended time and the only difference is GUI vs CLI mode then that's the most likely explanation. At this point it becomes a benchmark configuration problem and you need to ask the DaCapo people about it.

Thanks for the release notes link. I went through them but couldn't find a section that describes what configuration and packages goes into the different install types. Although there was a lot of good info there.

Have been continuing to delve into this issue. Wanted to add one more interesting tidbit. I attached an strace to one of the benchmarks, and it appears that something called futex is taking up 99.06% of the time, and the average time per call is over 10 times slower(891 microseconds vs 74 microseconds) on the minimal install compared to the full install.